Don't Put Anything Critical on Wifi Alone
Okay. New module. We've spent a lot of time getting things connected to wifi, and now I want to spend a lesson talking about what happens when that wifi goes down. Because it will. Not often, hopefully, but it will.
Here's the thing—every smart device in your house is only as reliable as your internet connection and your power. Both of those go out sometimes. Storm up the canyon knocks out power for a few hours. Your router hiccups and needs a reboot. Your internet provider has an outage that's out of your hands completely. None of that is rare. It's just Tuesday, eventually, for everybody.
So the question I want you asking about every smart device before you buy it is: what happens when this doesn't have internet? If the answer is "nothing works and there's no backup," think hard about whether that thing should be smart in the first place.
Where this actually matters
Lights not turning on when the wifi's down is annoying. You flip the switch on the wall, which still works, and you move on with your evening.
A smart lock not working when the wifi's down is a different problem entirely. You're standing on your porch at 9pm with groceries and the app won't load and there's no way in. I've heard this from more than one person in this class already, actually, somebody in an earlier session mentioned getting locked out on a lock that needed the app to unlock, no physical key backup at all. That's the situation you don't want.
My opinion, and I'll say it plainly: don't put anything critical on wifi alone. A smart lock is nice. Keep a real key that works no matter what. A smart garage door opener is nice. Keep the physical remote in the car. A camera system watching your house is nice. Understand that if the internet's out, it's not watching anything, and plan around that instead of assuming it always will be.
The flag story
I want to tell you about a neighbor's doorbell I set up a while back, because it's related, even though it's not about power going out.
This guy's doorbell camera was going off constantly. Two hundred notifications the first day. He almost sent the whole thing back, figured it was garbage. I went over to look at it and it turned out his flagpole was right in the camera's field of view, and every time the flag moved in the wind, the camera called it motion and pinged his phone.
Took me ten minutes to narrow the detection zone so it ignored that part of the yard. Should've set that zone up correctly when we first installed it, honestly, that's on me. But the reason I bring it up here is this: that guy trusted his camera completely once it stopped annoying him. Two hundred alerts a day, and he was ready to trust zero of them, or trust all of them blindly out of exhaustion. Neither one's right. A smart device is a tool that helps you, not something you hand your judgment over to. Same idea applies to locks and doors. Useful, yes. The only thing standing between you and your house? No.
What to actually check, at home, this week
Pull out your phone and look at whatever smart device in your house matters most. Ask these questions:
- If wifi goes down, can I still get in my house, turn off my stove, or whatever this device controls?
- Is there a physical backup — a key, a switch, a manual button — that works without any of this?
- If the power goes out entirely, not just wifi, what happens? Some locks run on batteries and keep working. Some don't.
For anything that controls access to your house — locks, garage doors — the backup isn't optional. Keep a spare key somewhere that isn't inside the house you'd be locked out of. Sounds obvious. People still keep the spare key in a drawer inside the house.
For anything that's just convenience — lights, plugs, that kind of thing — no backup needed beyond the switch on the wall, which was already there before you started this class and still works fine.
One more small caution while we're here: don't let a smart lock's battery die without noticing. Most apps warn you at some percentage, but check that setting is actually turned on. A dead battery on a lock at 11pm is a bad night.
Before next time
Take five minutes and check the one device in your house you'd be most annoyed to lose if the internet went down for a day. Figure out what your backup actually is. If you don't have one, that's the thing to fix first. No worries at all if the answer right now is "I don't have a backup"—that's exactly why we're doing this.